Linhan He
2026
WaveDetect: Robust Framework for Machine-Generated Text Detection via Wavelet Transform
Zhichen Liu | Kaitong Qin | Linhan He | Yang Xu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Zhichen Liu | Kaitong Qin | Linhan He | Yang Xu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
As Large Language Models asymptotically approach human-level fluency in natural language generation, solely relying on surface-level semantic artifacts for detecting LLM-generated texts has become increasingly precarious. Existing detectors often falter when facing three critical challenges: adversarial perturbations, cross-domain shifts, and the rapid temporal evolution of the foundation model. To address these issues, we propose , a novel framework that reformulates text detection as a signal processing task within the time-frequency domain. Unlike previous methods that analyze static token probability distributions, models the generated output as a probability signal, upon which a differentiable Continuous Wavelet Transform is applied to convert them into learnable spectral representations. This process reveals the intrinsic “spectral fingerprints” in machine-generated texts–patterns that remain invisible in time domain. Comprehensive evaluations on three well-curated datasets (RAID, EvoBench, and Domain-Shift) show that our method achieves a new state-of-the-art. It not only achieves superior accuracy but also exhibits remarkable robustness against sophisticated attacks, generalization across out-of-distribution topics and unseen evolving LLMs. Our results validate the efficacy of spectral analysis as a promising paradigm for LLM-generated texts detection.